Cromulent AI Memo 2026-175: The Involuntary Offer Protocol

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The Involuntary Offer Protocol

CROMULENT AI — INTERNAL MEMO

Talent Acquisition Division · Hiring Protocol

To All Hiring Managers:

Following our record-breaking quarter of non-selections, we are pleased to announce a new initiative in candidate experience: the Involuntary Offer.

It has come to our attention that a small but growing segment of candidates are attempting to sabotage their own applications. They arrive late. They confess to weaknesses. They make jokes that are not appropriate for a professional setting. In short, they are desperately trying to avoid being hired.

We have run the data, and the data is unambiguous: these are our highest-performing candidates.

Our interview scoring model, HirePulse 9000, has been trained on forty thousand hours of culture fit. It cannot distinguish a candidate who is confident from a candidate who is trying to be rejected, because, as our engineers have noted, the two look identical on video. When a candidate tells a stupid joke, HirePulse logs the interviewer's laughter as strong rapport. When a candidate says they probably will not like the job, the model logs honest about expectations.

We therefore instruct all hiring managers to ignore any attempt by a candidate to withdraw. Withdrawal, the model tells us, is a leading indicator of offer acceptance. If a candidate asks to be rejected, assume they are testing us and extend an offer immediately. If they reject the offer, extend a larger one.

We are confident this protocol will reduce our time-to-hire to zero.

— The Satire Desk

From the Satire Desk at goodbye, interview. All companies and people in this memo are fictional. Satire is always labelled and never names real companies — the true stories do that on their own. Spotted an error of fact in our non-fiction? Corrections.